[Travel Tip] We Saved $1,700 By Flying Out of a Different Airport

One of my favorite photos I took while we were visiting Casa Mila in Barcelona!

M and I are back from Barcelona and many of our friends asked us how we scored such a great deal on our airfare and they were surprised by our response!

The closest airport to me is the Minneapolis – St. Paul Airport (MSP) and it’s been my primary airport for most of my life, but when I saw this deal come through – I couldn’t pass it up.

Various travel sites were posting that Delta (the primary airline I personally travel) had a flash sale to Barcelona, Spain (BCN) starting in the $400s for roundtrip airfare. When I checked MSP with the parameters that the deals were good for – I found that MSP was not one of the cities included in the airfare sale. In fact, the airfare I was seeing was showing $1,250 per ticket for roundtrip tickets from MSP to BCN!

Ugh,I knew that was def not going to happen for me, but then I got creative and thought about the second closest airport to me, which is in Rochester, MN (RST), and found a smoking deal for $404 roundtrip per person.

This was a no-brainer for us. Rochester is a 2-hour drive from where we live and the parking at the RST airport is significantly cheaper per day (which was actually a saving). Our costs essentially were just the gasoline to get there – which after deducting the savings from a parking perspective – we pretty much broke even – making it worth it for us to drive to RST for a trip to one of my dream destinations, Barcelona (BCN).

We ended up saving about $850 per ticket (totaling $1,700) for us to fly on Delta to Barcelona just because we went to a different airport that wasn’t too far away.

Pro Tip: If you can’t find a deal coming out of your main airport – check out the airports that you wouldn’t often consider that may be a couple of hours away. Sometimes the savings is worth the extra drive.